Connoisseurship 品定め

Re-Reading Genji #4 ゆふがほ (夕顔 / Yūgao)

The Yūgao chapter harkens back to the rainy night conversation of chapter two, when Genji and his pals were whiling away the night trying to decide what makes for the finest qualities in a woman.

雨夜の品定め, amayo no shina sadame.

The Japanese really says, “a rainy night deciding quality.”

定め sadame is a type of connoisseurship. It is an embodied “know-how” whereby a person can skillfully respond to art, poetry, fragrances or just about anything really. Because the appraisals are usually based with a practitioner’s know-how, I think of it as a combination of connoisseurship (abstract mental expertise) and virtuoso (performative expertise) understanding in the subject.

In the words of my favorite classical Japanese translator and scholar Ivan Morris:

What makes Murasaki’s world so unusual is the way in which refined standards of cultural appreciation and performance had become generally accepted values among members of the ruling class. Artistic insensitivity damned a gentleman of the Heian court as fatally as did a reputation for cowardice among the nobility of the West. Genji and his friends are all critics, and one of their great pleasures when they meet is to engage in ‘judgements’ (sadame). Sometimes (as when the group of young men meet in the palace on a rainy night) they will exchange critical observations about different types of women; but far more often the objects of their discussions are paintings, books, styles of musical performance. The women are not behindhand in this, and the Pillow Book describes the ladies of Empress Sadako’s court engaged in heated ‘judgements’ about books or picture scrolls.

It is like walking into a regional museum in Southern France —not even being particularly attentive to things— when your glance happens to fall on a picture and you just “know” it’s a Bronzino. Boom! This is called being an “eye.” Before scientific forensics, all art attributions in European art depended on such “eyes” to make authentications. the art historian made it her business to have seen as many examples of the style they specialized in to be able to “see” and recognize who the painter is based on their bodily experience of looking at the painter’s work and understanding the painter’s lineage.

Nowadays, quality is judged more analytically. In art, there is scientific forensics and iconography. In perfume and incense, or food, the basic ingredients are analyzed in terms of individual quality and craftsmanship. But during the Heian period in Japan, things were understood through personal connoisseurship. The elite had internalized the basic cultural knowledge base, knowing it by heart, if you will, and this enabled them to make aesthetic judgements.

In the case of Genji’s Chapter Four, the frail beauty of Yūgao references what Tō-no-Chūjō said in Chapter Two about favoring women who are pliable and incapable of jealousy. He also thinks finding a woman whose family has fallen on hardship can work well in a man’s favor. (I think nowadays when we judge other people in terms of romantic partnership, we think in terms of kindness and shared interests maybe?)

In Japan, I used to have a recurring dream that I lived in a house completely covered in flowers, of the kind I saw sometimes in Tochigi. The house was always extremely ramshackle and basically falling apart under the weight of the tangles of vines and flowers.

I picture Yūgao living in a house like that. There is much clatter of people working, since this is a working-class neighborhood to which Genji has descended. There is also much prayer.

Yūgao is also a foil for the most interesting character in the Tale of Genji, Lady Rokujo. More on her next time…covered in flowers like morning glories.

Recommended:

The Eye: An Insider's Memoir of Masterpieces, Money, and the Magnetism of Art by Philippe Costamagna

Video:

"Most People are Visually Illiterate" - Rembrandt's J'Accuse (2008) - dir. Peter Greenaway